Back to the future?...

[BobP 56]

I'm a huge supporter of the new features and capabilities of FSX and having a blast with the FP Beta. I was ask by a friend what the difference is between the new Mission feature today and the old Adventure language we had back in '98.:) Well, I don't know the answer since I don't program any more and never fooled with the adventure language. They both allow the creation of scenarios, but what is the difference? Thanks in advance.Bob...

[barryward12345 0]

Actually, the last 2 versions FS2002 and 2004 have had an "adventure" programming capability. It was not an easy thing to learn - but some people did master it -- BUT frankly, the adventures were not very popular. Those that did like them , liked them a lot. But the difficulty of creating them combined with an overall lack of interest caused their demise. It will be interesting to see if missions fare any better.I have always felt that there is great potential in adventures/missions - particularly insofar as the educational possibilities of the Sim are concerned. We shall see.Barry

[beatle 0]

Hi Bob,The older adventure systems (both the older FS95 era ADV and the newer versions ABL based system) were basically procedural style langauges that were compiled into byte interpreted intermediate code.The new mission system is more of an object oriented trigger based system (i.e. there really isn't any "code", you define various objects, triggers, etc and you define how they interact with each other and the user, etc). Things you can define include simple things like bounding boxes to determine if the user has flown through a volume, to instantiating 3D scenery objects (like oil rigs, buildings, etc). Triggers include things like flying through a bounding box (mentioned above), going over or under some altitude/speed/etc, landing successfully, crashing, etc). The missions are written in XML and there is a mission editor included in the SDKs that come with the deluxe version.Tim

[BobP 56]

Thank you Barry and Tim for your responses.Bob...

[Chock 17,769]

I agree that the missions in the previous version of FS were not that easy to create, but then again, they weren't that hard either if you were prepared to read up on the SDK and do a bit of G-Max stuff, as I did (and if you do a search on 'Jake Freedom' in the AVSIM file library you'll see that what few adventures there were, did prove reasonably popular, as the Jake Freedom adventure which I created for FS9 had topped one thousand downloads last time I looked).Anyway, the newer method for mission creation seems to be a bit more accessible, and I for one certainly welcome that, as I think it's an area of flight simulation which can only serve to popularise the genre to a wider audience, and should lead to some creative input from those who were previously prevented from doing so by the offputting 'geek' requirements.